Thursday, January 26, 2006

I found the following open
letter from Christian clergy to be very true. I was really
pleased to see that my priest from Ohio signed it, as did my father
and his wife. My father always taught me that God created evolution.
On another topic entirely is that my former representative, now
jailed, makes paintings.
An Open Letter Concerning Religion and Science:Within the community of Christian believers there are areas
of dispute and disagreement, including the proper way to interpret
Holy Scripture. While virtually all Christians take the Bible
seriously and hold it to be authoritative in matters of faith and
practice, the overwhelming majority do not read the Bible literally,
as they would a science textbook. Many of the beloved stories found in
the Bible, the Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah and the ark, convey
timeless truths about God, human beings, and the proper relationship
between Creator and creation expressed in the only form capable of
transmitting these truths from generation to generation. Religious
truth is of a different order from scientific truth. Its purpose is
not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts.
We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions,
believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of
modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of
evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to
rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and
achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as "one
theory among others" is to deliberately embrace scientific
ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that
among God's good gifts are human minds capable of critical
thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection
of the will of our Creator. To argue that God's loving plan of
salvation for humanity precludes the full employment of the God-given
faculty of reason is to attempt to limit God, an act of hubris. We
urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science
curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a
core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science
and that religion remain religion, two very different, but
complementary, forms of truth.

Saturday, January 21, 2006

let haskell' = succ haskell98 in
Announcing the Haskell' ("Haskell-Prime") process. A short time ago,
I asked for volunteers to help with the next Haskell standard. A
brave group has spoken up, and we've organized ourselves into a
committee in order to coordinate the community's work. It will be the
committee's task to bring together the very best ideas and work of the
broader community in an "open-source" way, and to fill in any gaps in
order to make Haskell' as coherent and elegant as Haskell 98.
Our task is broadly defined by our mission statement:
The Haskell programming language is more-or-less divided into two
"branches". The Haskell 98 standard is the "stable" branch of the
language, and that has been a big success. A lot of progress has been
made over the last few years in the "research" branch of the Haskell
language. It is constantly advancing, and we feel that it is time for
a new standard which reflects those advancements.
Haskell' will be a conservative refinement of Haskell 98. It will
be the work of this committee to adopt a set of language
extensions and modifications and to standardize a new set of
libraries.
We will strive to only include tried-and-true language features,
and to define them at least as rigorously as Haskell 98 was
defined. This standard will reflect the realities of developing
practical applications in the Haskell language. We will work closely
with the rest of the Haskell community to create this standard.
Your Haskell' Committee is as follows (slightly munged email addresses
follow):
* Manuel M T Chakravarty <chak at cse.unsw.edu.au>
* John Goerzen <jgoerzen at complete.org>
* Bastiaan Heeren <bastiaan at cs.uu.nl>
* Isaac Jones <ijones at galois.com>
* John Launchbury <john at galois.com>
* Andres Loeh <loeh at iai.uni-bonn.de>
* Simon Marlow <simonmar at microsoft.com>
* John Meacham <john at repetae.net>
* Ravi Nanavati <ravi at bluespec.com>
* Henrik Nilsson <nhn at cs.nott.ac.uk>
* Ross Paterson <ross at soi.city.ac.uk>
* Simon Peyton-Jones <simonpj at microsoft.com>
* Don Stewart <dons at cse.unsw.edu.au>
* Audrey Tang <autrijus at gmail.com>
* Simon J. Thompson <S.J.Thompson at kent.ac.uk>
* Malcolm Wallace <Malcolm.Wallace at cs.york.ac.uk>
* Stephanie Weirich <sweirich at cis.upenn.edu>
The editors are Isaac Jones and John Launchbury.
Feel free to contact any of us with any concerns or questions. If you
don't know who to direct your questions to, email Isaac Jones
ijones at syntaxpolice.org.
Community involvement is vital to our task, and there will be a way
for members of the community to make formal proposals. In the opening
phases, please use these more informal resources to help us coordinate
Haskell':
* The haskell-prime mailing list. All technical discussion will take
place here, or (if other meetings take place) be reported here. Anyone
can subscribe, and any subscriber can post questions and comments,
and participate in discussions. Anyone can read the list archives.
http://haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-prime
* A wiki / issue tracking system to document consensus and to track
ongoing tasks. This system is publicly readable, but only
committee writable so that we may present it as the "official"
output of the committee. If you ever feel that the wiki is not
accurate as to the consensus, please alert the committee!
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime
* A darcs code repository for experiments, proposed libraries,and
complex examples. darcs is a decentralized system, so anyone can use
it, but patches should be sent to Isaac Jones:
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/SourceCode
Please join us in making Haskell' a success.

Other Software: I'm primary author or maintainer on several software packages: The Haskell Cabal, a Haskell filesystem called Halfs. I also contributed some of the original code for Debian's apt-get cryptographic signature checking.

Social Software:I'm on Twitter as well as LinkedIn. For professional relationships, please find me there. Personal friends can find me on Facebook.

Research: I've been involved in a number of research projects and groups. I'm currently with Galois. Previously, I've worked for an AI research firm called Aetion, as well as several Ohio State University research groups.